October 21, 2007: New home movie theatre (if only there were something to watch)

Living in hope (hey, Oscar season is coming up and I get a ton of free DVDs), we upgraded our viewing at Casa Longin/Simon with a high def DLP projector - the Mitsubishi HC1500. It's only 720p, but the machine rocks and the price is right. Besides, my eyes aren't that sharp I can even tell the difference, especially on the one hundred inch diagonal Gray Wolf II screen. I have become a Discovery Channel addict, at least in the short run, watching endless trips to the Amazon with frightening looking piranhas spattering blood all over the place in high definition. As for sound, I have down-graded to a simple Zvox, which generates surround sound out of a single box for only two hundred bucks. Rather incredible.

Last night we tried our first Oscar-season movie - The Namesake - directed by Mira Nair from the Jhumpa Lahiri novel. Great Indian locations (including the Taj Mahal), fine Indian actors, mediocre New York locations and very peculiar and unsatisfying story. The whole thing turns on the protagonist having been named Gogol by his father - not nearly enough for a movie (maybe not for the novel either, but I haven't read it).

Still, it looked great on the new setup. (Fred Elmes did the excellent cinematography. Costumes great too, but not nearly as good as in Nair's earlier Monsoon Wedding, a much better film.)

Comments

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Roger, re recent releases, if you haven't already, check out "Pan Labyrinth" on your new rig--

Posted by: Buddy Larsen at October 21, 2007 1:09 PM

Pan's Labyrinth was indeed excellent. Came in last year's batch.

Posted by: Roger at October 21, 2007 2:17 PM

oops, yes, "Pan's" --anyway, what a masterful personalization of the meeting of fascism and childhood. A little Communist-friendly, but hell, the Communist anti-fascist guerrillas of that time and place were the good guys after all. Lesser of two evils--and besides, Stalin hadn't yet co-opted them.

Posted by: Buddy Larsen at October 23, 2007 11:10 AM

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